Archive for April, 2010

This is the concluding part of my reply to a question from a friend who wanted to know my opinion of a paper by Dick Bryan, Randy Martin and Mike Rafferty entitled “Financialization and Marx, Giving Labor and Capital a Financial Makeover,” published in the 2009 Review of Radical Political Economics.

“Households,” Bryan, Martin and Rafferty write, “live the contradiction of being both capitalist and non-capitalist at the same time. Economically, the household not only consumes commodities and reproduces labor power, it also engages finance, particularly through its exposure to credit, the demands of financial calculation, and requirements of self-funding non-wage work in old age.”

Bryan, Martin and Rafferty point to the enormous growth of consumer credit. An increasing number of people in the imperialist countries are being exploited not only as wage and salaried workers but as debtors. This is part of the phenomena called “financialization” that Bryan, Martin and Rafferty are trying to come to grips with. How does “financialization” affect class and relations among the classes?

However, Bryan, Martin and Rafferty appear to be confused, perhaps by their exposure to marginalist notions, about who is and who is not a capitalist. Without a clear understanding of what we mean by “capitalist” we cannot even begin properly to analyze class and class relationships.

To begin with, I don’t like how they use the term “households.” Bourgeois economists such as Keynes, for example, like to use the term “households” to hide class. There is a world of difference between a capitalist “household,” which lives off the profit obtained through its ownership of capital, and a working-class “household,” which lives off the income obtained from selling the labor power of one or more members of the “household” for wages.

In the last reply, I explained that skilled workers though they receive higher wages than unskilled workers do not appropriate any surplus value. On the contrary, their higher wages reflect the higher value of their labor power.

A single commodity labor power is actually an abstraction. In the real world, there are different types of labor powers—plumbers, carpenters, jewelers, assemblers, and so on with different values. However, from the viewpoint of the industrial capitalists, these different types of labor powers have the same use value, they all produce surplus value.

If one type of labor power, say that of carpenters, had a lower rate of surplus value than other types of labor power, the demand for the commodity carpenter labor power would drop causing the wages of carpenters to drop and raising the rate of surplus value.

Likewise, if the rate of surplus value was higher for carpenter labor power than average, the demand for the commodity carpenter labor power would rise. This would cause the wages of carpenters to rise, lowering the rate of surplus value on carpenter labor power. Therefore, over time—assuming the absence of monopolies—the rate of surplus value produced by each type of labor power tends towards equality with all other types of labor power.

It is extremely inconvenient to treat each type of the commodity labor power as a different type of commodity. So in order to simplify, we make an abstraction. We view each type of skilled commodity labor power as a collection of simple labor powers. Each individual member of the collection—simple labor power—produces on average in an hour an hour of abstract labor—the very substance of value once it becomes embodied in a commodity.

Similarly, a very unskilled type of labor power would represent a fraction of a simple labor power. It might take a number of these labor powers to add up a single simple labor power.

This situation doesn’t exist in reality—it is an abstraction. However, once we make this abstraction, which is made daily though unconsciously in the market place, we simplify the problem greatly. After all, practical businesspeople often talk about “labor” costs without making a distinction between the particular types of “labor.” When businesspeople talk about “labor,” they—and the vulgar economists as well—mean the costs of labor power, since they buy the workers’ ability to work and not “labor.”

Therefore, instead of using the term simple labor power, we simply have to refer to the commodity labor power. I believe that when Marx used the term labor power without qualification, that is what he meant.

Were the higher values of the labor powers of the skilled workers the underlying cause of the betrayal of August 4, 1914?